Foreword
The Global Plastics Outlook: Policy Scenarios to 2060 provides policymakers with a long-term perspective on plastics, presenting a set of coherent projections on plastics use and waste as well as their environmental impacts. Through a series of policy packages, the Outlook demonstrates the environmental benefits and economic consequences of adopting more stringent policies.
This report follows the earlier related report, Global Plastics Outlook: Economic Drivers, Environmental Impacts and Policy Options, released in February 2022, which provided the first comprehensive global assessment of trends in plastics use, waste generation and leakage to the environment as well as policy levers to curb the environmental impacts of plastics.
This report is structured as shown below. Using state-of-the-art environment-economy modelling, the Outlook first uncovers the economic drivers that are projected to give rise to unprecedented volumes of plastics use, waste, and plastic-related environmental impacts until 2060. The Outlook then present policy scenarios with different levels of stringency, to understand their environmental and economic impacts by 2060: the Regional Action and the Global Ambition Scenario. Finally, the Outlook outlines interactions between plastics and climate mitigation policies.
